The epistemology of progressive politics: why we shouldn’t be surprised when rural immigrants vote conservative, and why we shouldn’t assume that assimilation is the underlying reason

How did Donald Trump (Mr. Build-a-wall-and-make-Mexico-pay-for-it) garner a substantial share of the Latino vote in 2016 followed by an increase in share in 2020?

How did Myra Flores flip a longtime Democratic congressional district as a Mexican-born Republican candidate for Congress in 2022?

I’ve heard some folks suggest that it’s no wonder that many Latino Americans, particularly those in rural areas, vote for conservative politicians because by living in rural areas, they imbibe an “American” worldview. This removes them from the “immigrant experience,” which then alienates them from their cultural roots.

The implication is that assimilation into American society and culture is more closely associated with conservative politics than it is with progressive politics.

Such a notion is supported by the oft-vocalized sentiment at UC Davis Law that non-white Americans who subscribe to, or even sympathize with, political or philosophical conservatism are betraying their “non-whiteness” by adopting the mentality of the “oppressors” (a bizarre proposition that requires its own critical analysis). Non-white conservatives are thus derided as mere sycophants.

Based upon this conception, Latino Americans ought to be naturally aligned with progressive politics, largely because they are “non-white,” but, admittedly, also because of progressive immigration and economic policies that ostensibly benefit Latino communities.

I question why this should be the case. In fact, I find this perspective to be problematic because it is in contradiction with the epistemology of progressive politics. Furthermore, this perspective is also ironic because it runs afoul some of the core tenets of Critical Race Theory, which undergirds the progressive philosophy of race.

Mari Matsuda has long argued that Critical Race Theory must “look to the bottom” to utilize the “intellectual tradition[s] of people of color in America” as a “new epistemological source for critical scholars.” (Matsuda 325). By doing so, she argues, Critical scholars can tap into an invaluable resource that had been previously overlooked by legal philosophers. (Matsuda 325-26).

Thus, to assess whether an essential synergy exists between non-white Americans and progressive politics, we must consider the epistemological foundations of progressive politics and compare it to the “intellectual traditions of people of color in America.”

This is precisely where the irony lies: progressive political philosophy, rooted in a liberal moral matrix, is a uniquely Western philosophical framework. (See Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 21-66 (2020)). By Western, here, I mean that the moral philosophy underpinning progressive politics exclusively arises from and within the intellectual milieu of Western Europe by Western European philosophers. This includes both progressive and libertarian bents of liberalism (e.g., Mill, Rousseau, and Rawls) as well as radical leftist movements (e.g., Marx, Engels, Marcuse, and Gramsci). Even Critical Race Theory itself is an offshoot of such Western thought (See Pluckrose & Lindsay, 111-134).

Jonathan Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion that the liberal moral paradigm is a unique anomaly found almost exclusively within “WEIRD” civilizations (western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). The liberal moral paradigm is one that emphasizes care/harm, liberty/oppression, and to some extent fairness/cheating, to the neglect of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. On the contrary, Haidt found that the social-conservative moral matrix equally values each one of these moral concerns.

Returning to the example of rural immigrants in America, how then should we view the Latino American rural vote? If we take Matsuda’s approach, we must consider the “intellectual traditions” of Latino Americans. Isn’t one of the most important intellectual traditions of most Latinos that of the Church? Can’t the same be said about the majority of African Americans too? Doesn’t this shed light on why many folks within such groups may be inclined to vote along the social conservative moral paradigm?

The upshot is that being “progressive” in American politics is to be truly “westernized” and assimilated into the intellectual tradition of the Western world. It is the European Enlightenment that “liberated” us from the blind intoxication of religion. German Marxism “freed” us from the chains of private enterprise. Western European postmodernism relativized morality and allowed us to deconstruct all societal structures. All of this paved the way for Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, Decolonial Studies, and the likes, to center identity politics as the core mechanism for identifying evil in the world.

Hence, radical progressivism, from an epistemological perspective, is as Western as it gets.

The most notable alternative framework to progressive liberalism is philosophical conservativism, which is rooted in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. This tradition simply cannot be reduced to the Western intellectual tradition; rather, it is eclectic. 

Thus, I find it comical that non-white rural immigrants can be criticized for "assimilating" into American culture when they profess social-conservative beliefs.

Nonetheless, the broader purpose of this post is to encourage us to properly analyze why non-white rural Americans may be attracted to conservative politics rather than writing off such folks with designations such as “pick-me,” “Uncle Tom,” “Tio Taco,” or “Uncle Bobby”.